17th February 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
What I Like to be Taughtbecause one of our assessors there had arranged an assessment day, but was then unable to do it. We could have cancelled the day, but that really does create a lot more trouble because it means rearranging assessment times for all of the tutors and the inevitable complaints about the inconvenience, which is fair enough. The only problem is that the tutors have to make sure they’ve prepared something to teach me, rather than the previous assessor. The trouble was, the weather completely scuppered those plans. Having made it to Paddington two and half hours before the first assessment, I was assured that the trains would get me there in plenty of time, got on one, and then all hell broke loose. I ended up stranded in reading, what was supposed to be a tantalising 24 minutes from Oxford, but with train after train being cancelled, we had to contact the applicants and cancel the assessments because it may have taken me another 3 hours to get there. The most annoying thing was that, I could have got there via pretty much any other means of transport, but as soon as I got on that train at Paddington I was doomed not to make it in time.
If any prospective tutors are reading this, I really enjoy abstract lessons that don’t require a lot of previous knowledge. It’s only those lessons where I can do something vaguely scientific, which I enjoy, but I had a great lesson a few weeks ago where a tutor taught me some Swedish by showing me a few Swedish sentences with English translations next to them, and then asking me to translate a few different, but similar sentences, from English to Swedish. I had never been taught in that way before, and obviously it didn’t get me speaking the language, which is a very important aspect, but it was one of the best language lessons I’ve ever had in an assessment.